Hello all. This is my first post in the forums here.
I am currently an artist in the game industry. I have been working as an artist and/or art director for the past 12 years. I have been working in ue4 for the past several years and have become reasonably practiced at developing custom materials. My focus has shifted, quite a bit, from making art content to understanding the render pipe better. I recently purchased some books on directx and learned to develop basic shaders in hlsl. I am learning the math and physics as I go. As I learn, I am realizing that I have a real passion for this. My goal, initially, was to learn to be a shader programmer. However, as I learn more, I grow curious about what it would take to make a full transition into becoming a render engineer.
I am curious where to start. I am piecing this all together as I learn at the moment. I.e render pipe, math, syntax, etc. Should I instead learn this in some particular order or fashion? Is schooling necessary to be successful in this endeavor?

This is is basically a general inquisition. This could be a major career change for me and I am looking to get started the right way.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Questions for women working in the video game industry:
1. What education you had before working in the video game industry?
2. Did you ever experience any sort of discrimination in the workplace?
3. What is/was your job role in the video game industry?
4. Why did you choose to work in the video game industry?
5. What challenges did you face in your job?
6. How many of your colleagues are women?
7. At school, did you have any spokesman from the video game industry or a workshop to expand your knowledge and views of that industry?
8. What can we do to encourage young girls to join the video game industry?
9. Was it hard getting a job in the video game industry?
10. In your opinion, what are the benefits of having more diversity in the workplace?

Good day to you all.
Firstly let me apologize in advance for this topic, since I fear this may be in the wrong place of the site. This is a question related to both career path and Game Design, so I didn't know where to ask it exactly. (If you rather skip all the background story which I would totally understand, just go read the last line please).

Now to the topic itself. I'm in the last year of a 4-year degree in Multimedia Engineering, a degree I chose in order to become a game designer in the future. However, far from meeting my spectations, the degree only focused on the technical aspects of game development (programming, scripting, engine programming, artificial inteligence...). I would've wanted to learn at least a bit of such things as:
Storytelling
Gameplay and mechanics design
Psycology of the player
World building
Level Design
Visual Narrative
Character creation & writting
As it turned out, my degree had zero subjects or projects to learn any of those things. So now I find myself with a big lack of knowledge to start working in the area of the industry I like.
As a result, I am currently looking for a good master's degree (1 year) to focus solely (or at least mostly) in learning game design. Problem is, there are not many options for this in my country (Spain) so I'm considering moving to the United States to study, where I have found several universities which offer this type of master's degree to learn game design. Before I move out however, I would like to make sure I don't make the same mistake I made when I chose my current degree, and hence that's why I'm here. I have found many of these master's but everyone has very generic names for the subjects and I want to approach my choice whith maximum care. Thank you sincerely to anyone taking the time to read down to this point.

Do you know of any good master's degree in the US or Europe for Game Design or have you studied one which taught you the basics of the things I mentioned in the list above?

Dear game developers – I'm currently working on my graduation work. As part of my bachelor thesis at Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, I examine to what extent the F2P business model can influence the long-term competitiveness of games. The Work focuses mainly on MMO games because of their long lifespan. Part of the work relates to developers and the impact of the F2P business model on them and their decisions when developing games. I have created six short questions that will help me to better understand this influence. The questions mainly relate to business and publishing sides of game development. I would like to ask you, if some of the developers here could answer these questions. Those of you who are interested, please send me a private message until March 16th and I will get to you with further details as soon as possible. Your contribution is greatly appreciated and it will help me to improve my thesis.
Thank you

Sydney Game Engine Developers Meetup - September

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Come join us for a night of engaging talks on how the gaming industry has evolved in the last 30 years and what you can learn about working with SVG formats for your technical documentation. Wargaming Sydney will be hosting its first joint Meetup, where game developers can mingle and meet with those who can help shed some light on how to manage your technical documentation.

There will be plenty of developers to network and converse with. This is a great opportunity in your games career development!